Financial Infidelity | 3 Steps to Help You Come Clean

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When one spouse keeps secrets from the other the stress and tension can eat a marriage up. You know something is wrong, but can't put your finger on it. Communication is down and a marriage could hang in the balance.

The secrets don't have to be earth shattering like drug or drinking problems. But according to statistics almost one-third of Americans lie to their spouses about money. Whether it's secret bank accounts, mounting debt, or falling earnings, there’s something shameful that’s being hidden.

It's not uncommon that there's secret stashes, there’s debt, there are even addictions or mistresses. And we’re afraid and don’t want conflict, and so we rationalize that for the peace of the relationship, we should say nothing.

It may be easier to not come clean with your spouse in the short term because you may feel you can work it out on your own. In some instances, it will work out and you will have avoided a close shave. But usually it doesn't work out that way, the problem becomes overwhelming and blows up in your face. You will have destroyed mutual trust and surely destroyed the relationship forever.

Why not come clean now before the lies go critical and wipe out your family. Here are a few ways to start the conversation going.

Find the right time.

You should find the right time when things are quiet and you have time to discuss it. In a humble way you have to state the problem completely and ask for forgiveness. Then be ready for feelings of betrayal and hurt to show. Getting through those feelings will be hard, but you must be patient and let them work their way out. Showing regret and a repentant attitude will help.

Show your credit record.

Showing black and white evidence of the extent of your misbehavior will only help the healing process. Seeing your credit report shows your need to be honest. Doing this now will only head off future problems. Imagine if you were able to keep things a secret and you spouse found out later when you were applying for a loan and a stranger revealed this to them.

Focus on the positives.

Exposing a lie that's yours is an embarrassing gut wrenching experience. Sure it's hard for a while but think of the future benefits of being honest. Even the deceiver will feel a ton of pressure relieved when the lie comes out. When both of you are involved and on the same page with money your relationship will flourish.

Reader: Have you ever kept a financial secret from your spouse?

Related articles

• Why all the financial infidelity? (divorcetalk.wordpress.com)
• Healing From Infidelity (pastoralcounselingsupportarticles.wordpress.com)
• Most American couples unfaithful ... about finances (today.msnbc.msn.com)
• The other kind of cheating in a marriage ()

Making Money Online is Possible - Learn How You can Do it

If your like me you are always looking for ways to make a little more money. Working on-line is a way and sometimes the only way most people have. It's a great way to to supplement your income and you can do it after hours or anytime you want. One way I am looking into is, writing articles.

Writing articles for people is a great way to earn income online, writing content for people is much easier than you may think it is. There are a few websites where people can join for free, and write content, and get paid per article they write. Using these kinds of websites is a great way make a few dollars and itch that writing bug. Below are two websites that you can try to write for.

The first website is Textbroker.com, but this website only accepts writers who are American citizens. The second website accepts writers from other countries, as well as citizens of the USA, and that website is Zemandi.com. Textbroker pays its' authors a little bit more money. For average writers they pay between $4.50 and $6.50 per 400 word articles. For better writers and longer articles the pay is more.



If your schedule is quite hectic or you don't think this is worth the amount of time needed, this isn't for you. But if you need to supplement your income and don't have more profitable options you should give this a try. 

If you could write an article in 1 hour, at $5.00 per article, for 20 days a month, you could earn $100 per month. It's not chicken feed. Contrast that to selling something on Ebay, with all the work of listing, packing, shipping, and acquiring the item. Can you make $100 on Ebay per month?

I have joined both Zemandi and Textbroker. If your thinking that you may not be a good enough writer to join these site and have acceptable articles, don't believe it. Most people with average intelligence can write decent articles. Most of the blogs you and I read everyday are written by average people with average ability. You could be a great writer and don't even know it.

Click Here for a Guide to Being a Freelancer

If you are good at writing, and have excellent grammar skills then writing for the website Wisegeek could be for you. Wisegeek is a website that people go to when they need answers to questions. People who want to write for Wisegeek need to fill out an application to write for them, and if they are accepted, they can be paid between $10-$14 an article. Wisegeek requires a more proficient writer with some professional background.

WordsofWorth.com and WritersAccess.com are two more websites that are kind of like Textbroker and Zemandi. These two websites allows writers to choose articles and receive a flat rate for the articles that they submit.

DigitalJournal.com is a website that allows people to be citizen journalists. If accepted then they can submit news articles and make a few dollars.

This is something I am going to try. Check this out for yourself and let me know how it goes for you.

Selling Your Car - Get the Highest Price - Go to Clearbook.com

When I wanted to sell my car I would always go to KelleyBlueBook.com and Edmunds.com to see what my car was selling for. It seemed complete and accurate. You could see the wholesale, retail, and private sale prices of what cars were going for. Though I couldn't figure out how they got the data for private sales. 

Well there is a new website on the block that is offering the same thing. It's called Clearbook.com. It combs millions of used car listings on the Web and analyzes that data to provide consumers with an indication of how much a particular used vehicle (down to the year, make, model, mileage and condition) is worth.

So what's the difference between Clearbook.com and the others? Clearbook.com entire process occurs on one page. The others have page after page loading in between every option. It seemed very Web 2.0 while the others felt clunky and old style. Listed in order of speed and ease of use. First is Clearbook.com followed by Autotrader.com, KBB.com, and nadaguides.com.

I put in my info for a Ford Excursion my Dad has been wanting to sell and the prices seemed to jive with the other websites numbers. Though there is some variation site to site.

Future versions of the tool will also incorporate actual transaction prices and wholesale prices of the vehicle to provide a broader price context for the user. Clearbook.com hopes the new tool will help it create a robust database of pricing information that will ultimately help it release a trade-in service for consumers down the road.

Reader: what have you experiences been with these kind of websites?

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Financial Advice is Everywhere - But What do People do with it?

Image via WikipediaWhat is the financial literacy of this country? How many thousands of financial blogs are there? There is a money section in every newspaper. We have Money Magazine, Kiplinger and others magazines. We have Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey on TV and radio. With all this good information, why is so much of the population in a financial mess?

 Where has all this information gotten us? We are in a level of indebtedness that some think is dangerously high? People are out of work and they are afraid. With all the help out there to many people remain ill-equipped in understanding money matters.

 I propose there is to much focus on information and not enough on how it relates to real people. Author Bruce Sellery new personal finance book called Moolala: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things With Their Money (And What You Can Do About It) contends "We have given everybody more information than they can ever possibly consume, without giving them insights,”.

  Sellery describes how people were not grasping the informations financial lessons. He’s developed workshops on handling money and he’s written Moolala, a very approachable, self-help book full of quotes from people he’s worked with.

 He describes a couple he was advising who had a six figure income, money in mutual funds under performing the index's, no college fund for the 2 children and 2 new cars in the driveway.

His plan for the couple was what he called the "Priority Pyramid". Starting at the bottom:

Cash Flow. Are you earning more than you are spending? Maximize income and minimize expenses.

Debt. Have you eliminated useless credit card debt? Living below your income would help this.

Savings. Are you saving enough to meet your goals. Whether they are retirement, a car or putting the kids through college.

Taxes. Are you taking care of the tax implications of your investments by using tax free or tax deferred accounts.

Investment Performance. Are your investments keeping up with the benchmark indexes. If not why not just invest in the indexes?

Optimizing Investment Returns. Using other strategies to maximize gains.

After reading a little of Mr. Sellery's advice I don't see he is much different than any other financial guru. I see the same advice as all the rest. There is nothing new to his book.

Mr. Sellery retreads the golden oldies of personal finance. If your a new comer to the personal finance world take heed of these principles they are golden. But knowing something and doing something is to different things. The author makes the point that you have to change your behaviors to carry out your goals. You're in the mess you're in now because of your behaviors. You have a basic understanding of spending and saving, everyone has, but you don't focus on it. 

Financial knowledge is only the tool you use to get to your goal. It's like like buying a diet book or joining a gym, they're tools to a purpose. The knowledge is a tool. Your problem is your sitting there waiting for the tools to do the work, ain't going to happen. 

To make this money thing work you have to change. You must change on the inside, no book will do that for you. If your a spender, stop spending. If your not making enough money, do something to make more money. You need to turn the ship around and just do the opposite of all the dumb things your doing. You don't need to be a genius to be a winner with your money. 

Related articles

• Suze Orman's Tips for Earning More, Surviving Unemployment (dailyfinance.com)
• Cents and sensibility (financialpost.com)
• Why smart people do dumb things with their money (theglobeandmail.com)

Whats Better a Personal Loan or a Credit Card?

You want to paying off your debts in the most economically way. You have a choice between an old fashion unsecured personal loan from your bank or a credit card. Which do you use?

The Good.

With the personal loan you have a fixed interest rate and you make regular monthly payments over time, maybe 3 or five years. No variable rates. No confusing rules. You don't risk your home as with a home equity loan. If you default, you will just have to deal with a collection agency.

Among the banks promoting personal loans now: Wells Fargo, Discover Financial, Citi and CapitalOne. Wells Fargo says that it will lend from $3,000 to $100,000 for a term as long as five years. From Citi, you can borrow from $300 to $7,500. The banks keep the rates top secret until you apply, because they are “risk-based” — in other words, they vary according to your credit score.

The Bad.

The interest rates you will encounter on a personal loan will be between 10 and 15 percent. It will never change like credit cards can if you miss a payment.

With credit cards you could swing a zero or low interest balance transfer, beating the rate for a personal loan. You also have the flexibility to just make the minimum payment if one month the car breaks down and you need the money. Even if you can't get the low interest credit card balance transfer and just get your regular rate you still have more flexibility.

What about fees? With personal loans there is a an origination fee, of on average between $50 and $100 dollars, but with the credit card balance transfer you also have a fee which is between 3 and 5 percent of the loan amount.

The Ugly.

Now comes the best part, the psychology. How many times have you vowed to pay $500 on your bankcard balance transfer only to wimp out and pay $300 because you spent too much at Starbucks that month — or eating out. The $200 you didn’t pay stayed on your balance and accrued more interest for the bank. A payment, by the way, for a $10,000 loan for five years at 15% would be $238 a month.

The bottom line is credit cards have flexibility and personal loans don't. The flexibility has it's benefits and it's problems. If your undisciplined you could always just pay the minimum and also run the balance up again.

With the personal loan the discipline is built in, you have a fixed payment with a fix time frame. You could be paying higher interest for this benefit.

Reader: Which type of loan do you think is better?

Financial Education Is Not Enough To Save You From Yourself

Do you think you have enough financial knowledge to handle your own finances? I'm talking about all facets of your finances, from soup to nuts. If your response is no, thanks for being honest, I'll get back to you in a minute. If you said "Yes", we need to pursue this further.

I believe there are 3 types or levels of financial knowledge. The first is "Financial Literacy". Financial Literacy is a general knowledge of financial vocabulary, financial instruments, and when and why they are used. This consists of knowing of what an investment is and the different types. In banking you know the difference between a checking and savings account.

Next there is "Financial Knowledge". This a deeper knowledge of all things financial. You know about investments. You know the difference between mutual funds, ETF's, IRA's, cash accounts, derivatives, and types of brokers. You can actually tell me if a mutual fund is better than another mutual fund. You know when it's good to own bonds and when it's not. You have knowledge of health, disability, life, and long term care insurance. You can tell me all about fixed and variable annuities.

The third and final type of knowledge is "Financial Capability". This kind of knowledge is when you actually put into effect what you know and are successful at implementing it. The evidence of this knowledge is an emergency fund, a hefty retirement account in the correct vehicles, your living below your means, you have no credit card debt, you have a college fund for your children and your home is paid for or your close to paying it off.

Financial Capability is the final step in the journey of financial education because it describes financial knowledge, competence, confidence and practical skills, such as balancing a checkbook or household budgeting.

Are you at this last step yet? If not, why not? Where on the journey are you? You will never succeed financially if you don't reach this last step. We all know what's good for us, but do we do it?

For those of you who were honest enough to say No to my question, what are you going to do? You admit you don't have the knowledge to run your own finances. Is this a lack of knowledge or a lack of will? If this is a lack of knowledge then find the knowledge. Read a book. A complete book that will help you is Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, read it, do exactly what it says and you will be successful with money.

If you have a lack of will, we call that being lazy in my house. That can be fixed to but not by reading a book. That problem has to fixed on the inside. Make the decision and be a financial winner.